but the fact that the Linux market is too small to develop and support for and Netflix can't guarantee the studio-required DRM will not be circumvented.

ChromeOS has a netflix plugin. ChromeOS is basically a limited Linux distro, with a very limited X11 window manager. Netflix already *has* a working solution for the Linux market, and they added special checks so it won't run on non-ChromeOS machines.

I'm glad we have this workaround now, and I donated to the developer, but if I'm going to buy a video, I'd at least buy it from Amazon -- where they don't go out of their way to sabotage Linux and at least have a few help page entries about it.

Then they can go home satisfied, knowing that their world view is intact. All they really did was use coercion to force somebody to lie.

You'd think so -- that forcing a bully to apologize was pointless as they never mean it -- but what other solutions are there? Public shame is very effective in the schoolyard. You may be right that it's just the teacher's worldview that shaking down the kid in glasses for lunch money is wrong, but that -- oh. Wait.

Yeah, I guess... um. Would a fine as a fraction of a company's profits work better? The way these companies try to "use coercion to force" the competition out of the market is pretty troubling.

This is as bad as when Big Government sinisterly destroyed the hardworking Americans employed in the Asbestos industries. Damn that rascally "the State" and the institutions that strive to protect its citizens! The sooner we use these overzealous examples as an excuse to throw the whole thing out, the better we'll be.

Unless history is any indication, I suppose, but hyperbole and false indignation is all that separates us from animals.

I'm not sure of the exact term for it, but your example assumes the user is looking for photos of Scotland that they took and have stored on their local drive. What if they want to search for Scotland on the internet? Maybe someone else said something about Scotland, so they type in "Scotland" to look it up on Wikipedia, or to see image results for Scotland from Google. Or, more relevant to the shopping lens, maybe they typed in "kilts" because they want to buy one, not search for pictures of kilts on their local drive -- or to search for an app named "kilt", which is how the original feature worked.

I think that if Ubuntu had debuted Unity with web searches built in to the lens thing, people wouldn't be nearly as surprised and even outraged. It's the change from a purely local search (albeit one with several modules) to one that includes results from Amazon that's made it shocking. Nobody is protesting amazon being included in the search bar in Firefox, for example.

Personally, I'd prefer it if there was a toggle for internet searches in the search bar, down where the privacy notice is now, and add way more useful lenses like the wikipedia one. I'd actually use that.

That's good advice, but what if he wants to keep getting promoted? He should dress like a CEO -- that means either jeans and a hoodie, or jeans and a black turtleneck, depending on the industry he's in.